Building real relationships with extended family members

In the spirit of Eid, I’m sharing a story on how I tried to rebuild relationships with my long-lost cousins and started to embrace each’s unique and honest individuality.

When I was little, I was very close to my extended family; cousins and second cousins alike, both from my mother’s and my father’s side.

Most of us were born between 1994 to 1998, so we’re roughly the same age. We played together, celebrated birthdays together, and some of us even went to the same kindergarten and schools. Overall, we had a similar childhood.

However, as we approach our teenage years, we started to drift apart. I can’t accurately recall when that exactly was. I think it was when we got to high school. Or was it college? It’s probably a slow process but it felt like a sudden.

All of a sudden, we’re strangers who meet each other once a year. We lost track of what each of us was up to. I loved family gatherings when I was young, but I started to hate them as I grew old.

This is uncommon among Millennials and Gen Z. Most of us hated family gatherings. Just a quick glance on Twitter’s feed during Eid, it tells. It’s not without a reason.

Family gatherings had become synonymous with listening to your uncles and aunties brag about their kids, and then asking when will you graduate, when will you get married, plus a list of other cliches.

It’s easy to hate such a situation and hope that you can just sit out the whole thing. But I find this unsettling. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life getting anxious. I decided to work on the issue.

While calling them out and being vocal about it seems like a good idea, I know for sure it won’t work. Adults will be adults. It’s impossible to talk them through. I needed an alternative to work with.

Then….. Eureka!

I found that one of the reasons why such comments hurt so much was because I was, or at least, I perceive that I was being compared to. When a parent bragged about their son’s graduation, I could interpret that to imply that I was ‘less’ because I hadn’t. When someone asked, “Why are you not married yet?”, it felt like “Why are you not married yet, while your peers have?”.

Hence, I needed to adjust the mindset. Both internally, and externally. Internally, I needed to understand that it’s not a competition. Externally, I needed to change that jealousy into “I’m happy for you”.

To do this, I need to rework my relationship with my cousins.

I hadn’t interacted with them for a long time. So, I used to see them as a one-dimensional character, one-liner even, often collected from the noises I heard during the not-so-often gathering.

X was that cousin who studied law and graduated in less than 4 years. Y was that cousin who studied in the US.

It’s difficult to care about someone you barely know. Let alone being happy for them.

I started with the principle that I don’t want to see them as family members anymore, I wanted to see them as friends. I wanted to meet their real self, not a facade. I wanted to listen to their stories, not what their parents told.

While I can’t share a detailed account of the story, it’s their story as much as it is mine, I can share a general principle I took: I met them one by one, at their own turf.

I realize that people tend to divert from given topics when discussing in groups, even with a group of peers. It has to be personal, one on one conversations. Moreover, it has to be on their turf; their house, or their favorite coffee shops so that I can meet their true self, their true friends, and live their authentic life experiences.

I strike up conversations related to life, passion, ideologies, and belief. I opened up about mine; my fears, insecurities, grieves and so do they. I replicated this several times, to different family members, with personalized modifications each time.

We started to understand where each of us was coming from, each’s thought process, and how our different life experiences lead us to where we are right now.

It’s around three years since I’ve started the processes and I haven’t covered everyone yet. However, for those that I’ve gone through with, I can testify that we’re no longer just a group of people coincidentally born into the same family.

I’m now enjoying family gatherings more than ever. The adults can say whatever they like, I am no longer annoyed. I no longer compare myself against them, I understood their thought process: why they choose a certain path and why I chose mine. And best of all, I can sincerely say “I’m happy for them” and be at peace.

Caveats:

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